Independent fan guide. Details reflect the launch patch (v1.0.3) and cite official sources; if the game updates, in-game text always wins.
01Where your saves live
On Windows, your entire working life as a worm lives in one folder: AppData, then LocalLow, then Zach and Mason, then Worming from Home. Paste that path into the file explorer's address bar and you are looking straight at the game's memory. On macOS the same data sits under your user Library's Application Support folder, following the same Zach and Mason naming, so the habit transfers between platforms with only the path changed.
Inside, the saves are plain JSON, the humble text format of the web, which means you can open one in any text editor and watch your career stare back at you: numbers with names, though we will not pretend the field names are documented, because they are not. What matters is the format. It is human-readable, it is small, and copying it is lossless. There is no database, no encryption, no proprietary container. A folder copy is a complete backup.
You also get three save slots, developer-confirmed, which is more generosity than this genre usually shows. Three slots plus a copy habit means you can park a risky run, start something reckless in another slot, and never gamble your only worm. Every slot lives in that one folder, which is why this guide keeps repeating the same four words: copy the whole folder.
One practical wrinkle on Windows: AppData is a hidden folder by default, so do not go hunting with mouse clicks. Paste the full path into the file explorer's address bar and the folder opens without a fight. Once you are there, pin it to Quick Access; you will be back before the interview, and again before the patch after that.
02The three slots, used properly
Three slots is what the developer confirms, and the game never nags you to use more than the first one, so here is a layout that earns its keep. Keep your real run in the first slot. Reserve the second for experiments: the keyboard you might regret, an expensive joke purchase, a choice you want to see both sides of. Leave the third alone as an archive, the slot you copy your best state into and then never touch.
The experiment slot exists because some decisions in this game ship without an undo button. The keyboard line is the famous case: the upgrades run clacky, slim, ultra slim and finally touch, the community reports the touch keyboard double-presses letters you never aimed at, and there is no documented way to switch back once it is bought. A save parked from before the purchase, whether in another slot or a dated folder, is the only rewind that exists. The same logic covers the pricier lifestyle items, where finding out what Kevin does for ten thousand dollars is better as a curiosity than a career decision.
Slots also make the completion stretch cheaper. Chasing 100% involves runs at Imminent Layoff Mode and the Wormhole, and parking your promoted, fully upgraded worm in a safe slot while a second slot eats the hard attempts means one bad Torment evening never costs the main career. Call it a loadout, call it insurance; the slots are free and the copies are instant.
03How saving works, and what nobody knows
Here is what is documented: the game writes plain JSON locally, supports Steam Cloud with a quota of roughly 95 megabytes, and offers three slots. Here is what is not documented, anywhere we looked: the auto-save cadence. Nobody outside the two developers can tell you whether the game saves after every task, every in-game night, or every idle minute, and this guide is not going to guess. Assume saves land at moments you cannot predict and you will never be surprised.
That unknown is the entire argument for a manual habit. When a game announces that it just saved, you relax; when nothing announces anything, you take snapshots at moments you choose. The thirty-second ritual in the next section replaces certainty you do not have with insurance you do, and in a game that already asks you to memorize phone numbers and employee IDs, one more small ritual is barely a burden.
One more documented detail rounds the picture out: because Steam Cloud handles these files, your slots can follow you between machines, from a desktop to a Steam Deck, or a Windows box to a Mac. How sync interacts with backups deserves its own section, because the two jobs get conflated constantly. The short version is that the cloud moves your saves; it does not remember them.
04Why this game earns backups
Plenty of games ship without ever needing a backup plan. This one earned the habit in its first week, for three specific reasons, and none of them are paranoia about disk failure. The soft-lock alone would justify the ritual; the rest of the list is bonus persuasion. By the end of this page, copying one folder should feel less like caution and more like clocking in.
First, the soft-lock. Buying the webcam or the soundboard before Steve's call asks for them can stall the promotion chain, and the only community-known fix is restoring a save from before the purchase. Without a backup, the options are waiting for a patch or starting over; with one, the whole incident is a shrug. The bug is acknowledged and being worked on, but the fix arrives on the developers' schedule, not yours.
Second, patches move things. Version 1.0.3, two days after launch, removed the 32nd achievement, Why?, and swapped its Torment Mode reward for a wall plaque. No save was harmed that day, but the principle was demonstrated in public: this game is being actively tuned, and objectives and rewards can shift between versions. A folder copied before you update is a time capsule of a version you already know works.
Third, the interview. The promotion call is a one-shot graded finale, timed typing included, and the difference between an S and something sadder can be a single fumbled key. Snapshot your save before that call and the worst outcome is disappointment, not doubt about whether you should have copied the folder first.
05What to back up, and when
Here is the schedule in table form, ranked by how much pain each backup prevents. The middle column is deliberately identical every time, which is the entire point of the exercise: one folder, copied whole, dated so future-you can read it, done. If your situation is not on the list, the rule of thumb at the bottom still covers it.
Notice what the table never asks you to choose: shop items, stock portfolio, relationship state, perk points. The folder copy takes all of it along automatically, which is why whole-folder beats picking through files one by one. Your backup does not need to understand the game; it only needs to contain it.
| Situation | What to back up | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Before the promotion interview | The whole save folder | A one-shot graded call; insurance against a bad take |
| Before a big purchase, especially webcam or soundboard | The whole save folder | Early purchases are the known soft-lock trigger |
| Before installing any patch | The whole save folder | Version 1.0.3 already changed achievements and rewards |
| After a long session you would hate to repeat | The whole save folder, dated | Auto-save cadence is undocumented; do not trust luck |
| Before moving to another machine | The folder, plus a Steam Cloud check | Cloud syncs the current state; it does not package history |
| Before touching any file by hand | That exact file | Hand edits are the fastest route to a corrupted slot |
06The pre-interview backup ritual
The interview is the moment this habit was built for, so learn it there. The whole routine takes about thirty seconds, needs no tools beyond your file explorer, and turns the finale from a held breath into a normal evening. Run it once here and you will find yourself running it before every big purchase and every patch without being asked.
Those same six steps protect every other risky moment on the calendar, which is why we teach them once and point back to this page. Before a big purchase, before an update, before anything with a deadline attached: quit, copy, date the folder, relaunch. The muscle memory builds faster than you would expect.
- Quit the game completely so no file is mid-write.
- Open the save folder: AppData, then LocalLow, then Zach and Mason, then Worming from Home.
- Copy the entire folder, all slots, not a single file.
- Paste it somewhere safe with a dated name, such as worming 09-12 before interview.
- Relaunch, take Steve's call, and stop worrying about the timer.
- Once the grade is in, back the new state up too; the promoted worm is worth preserving.
07How to restore a backup
Restoring is the ritual in reverse, with one rule that actually matters: close the game first, fully, not merely paused at the main menu. With the game shut, copy the contents of your dated backup back over the save folder, replacing what is there, then launch and pick the slot you were on. The worm rewinds to the moment you copied, money, tasks, relationships and all.
If Steam Cloud raises a conflict prompt because it noticed the files changed underneath it, choose the local version, the one you just put back. That is the whole decision. You restored these files on purpose, so tell the cloud to keep them, let the sync settle, and play a minute before you overwrite or delete anything else.
Restores are also the documented fix for the soft-lock, which makes them worth practicing before you need one. Take the backup from before the offending webcam purchase, restore it, buy nothing until Steve asks, and the promotion chain picks up where it parked. Ten minutes start to finish, most of it spent waiting for the game to load.
Two ways a restore goes wrong are both human rather than technical: grabbing the wrong snapshot, the one from after the webcam purchase instead of before it, or saving an edit over the only good copy. Check the dates on the folders before you copy anything, keep the original untouched, and the rewind works exactly as advertised. Backups protect progress; dated names protect the backups.
08Steam Cloud is not a backup
Steam Cloud does a real job here, to be fair about it. With a quota around 95 megabytes against save files that measure in kilobytes, every slot you own fits many times over, and your progress follows you between a desktop and a Deck, or a Windows machine and a Mac, automatically. That automation is exactly the comfort that makes people stop copying folders.
But sync is not versioning. The cloud keeps the current state of your files, and it will keep a broken one, or a soft-locked one, with the same reliability it kept your best run. If today's save is bad, the cloud's whole job becomes making sure it is bad on every machine you own. The dated local folder is the only thing in this setup that remembers yesterday, which is why it stays the real backup no matter how politely the cloud behaves.
A note for two-machine players, Deck and desktop say, or Mac and PC: let the sync settle before you start playing, especially after a restore, because the version that wins is whichever lands last. Nothing in launch-week reporting points at sync failures for this game, and with save files this small it should stay that way. The conflict prompt is the one moment the cloud asks your opinion, so answer it deliberately.
09Editing saves by hand: read this first
Because the files are plain JSON, you can technically open one in a text editor and change your bank balance, and no doubt somebody already has. Before you do, know three things. The save format has no community documentation: nobody has published a field list, so every edit is archaeology. A typo in JSON can leave the game unable to read the file, which is a corrupted slot in every way that matters. And nothing in an edited save was earned, which counts for something in a game whose achievements include holding $100,000 in the bank.
That last point deserves saying without smugness. Your save is your business, in a single-player game about white-collar crime of all things. But an edited wallet means the achievements that measure money, 10% of the Way to Buying a House among them, stop meaning what they claim to mean, and no community tool exists to audit a save afterward. If you edit, you are flying without instruments.
The safe version of curiosity is read-only. Open a copy rather than the live file, see what a worm's career looks like in plain text, and close it without saving. If you ever do edit for real, keep the untouched original one folder away, because that file is now the only thing standing between you and a fresh start on day one.
10When a backup saves your week
Walk the full scenario once and the habit sells itself. It is day four, money is good, and you buy the webcam early because the shop finally lets you. Steve's next objective still asks for a webcam, the shop page says SOLD, and the promotion chain is parked. Without a backup, this is a support-thread post and an open-ended wait. With the folder you copied before shopping, it is: quit, restore, relaunch, wait for the call, buy when told. The community has documented no other fix, and the developer's patch has no date attached yet.
Backups also make the bolder parts of the game more fun, which is the part nobody expects. Show Kevin to the interview webcam without fear. Hang up on Steve for the achievement, then restore back to before the rudeness if you want the clean timeline anyway. Take the midnight insider-trading call twice to hear the answer you did not pick the first time. A worm with a safety net is a noticeably braver worm.
Keep one limit in mind as you get comfortable: a restored save wakes up inside the current patch. When version 1.0.3 changed the achievement list two days after launch, no reports of broken saves followed it, but the pattern is worth knowing. Backups rewind your files, not the game around them, so a future patch that moves an objective will meet your restored worm the same way it meets everyone else.
From here, the performance guide covers the rest of the launch-week bug list, the promotion guide walks the interview itself, and the beginners guide gets a fresh worm through day one. Copy the folder, date the folder, close the text editor, and go be somebody's newest associate financial analyst. A six-year career deserves thirty seconds of insurance.